cuslog,

The reason I was thinking about buying a castings set, was to be able to hold a part in my hand and see some of the details, I know the holes and other machining steps would still need to be done.

Someone did put a lot of work into those plans, but it would have been nice to have missing dimensions like the centers of radii layed out

My goal is still to build one from scratch.

It would be great to see some of your drawings.

Radkins,

The plans are the ones offered through the archives here, i don't know if they are the same ones on E-Bay.

Your advice about making a "cut-away" action is great, and would save a lot of work in the long run, I believe.

cuslog,

Thank you for the link to Alphawolf's discussion, I will check it out for sure.

Rick 4070.
The plans on EBay appear to be copies of the ASSRA plans sold at a rip of price of 30-50 US Dollars more than ASSRA charge. The ASSRA plans are good and when enlarged to full size are excellent. However, as many have found out there are some errors in the plan dimensions and it pays to double check that some parts will fit together before you machine them.

As far as the Shiloh Sharps 1885 Browning Single Shot Action Castings are concerned, I understand that the Company were intending to make them themselves, but, they purchased another company with another much rarer Sharps Model on their catalogue and Shiloh went with that model. Shiloh Sharps say that all their products are interchangeable with the original rifles and they would have made their castings of sufficient size to allow for shrinkage of the castings on cooling from molten to solid state. 

Shiloh offer different levers, and set trigger castings for the 1885, you don't get everything you see on their picture of parts, if there is a choice of parts you have to select which one you want when you order. One advantage of their company policy is you can order a single part if you have made a mistake in your machining or finishing of the part. As for plans, I would suggest you ask Shiloh Sharps if they supply them, I assume they will, as they must have drawn them up for production. Almost all the parts for the production of Shiloh Sharps rifle actions are castings which the company machine down to size. There was a video on their Website showing the production procedures in manufacture, but that seems to have disappeared recently.

You will find that you may have to make several fixtures to hold parts when machining them. Copying any action requires a lot of lateral thinking when it comes to machining parts. If nothing else it's good exercise for the brain. Have fun.

Harry

I built a high wall from Frontier Armory castings using the ASSRA plans, but purchased from Frontier Armory. I did find some discrepancies in the prints, but since the castings themselves were somewhat off due to shrinkage some creative engineering was necessary.

I don't recall specific problems with fitting the lever linkage or excessive fitting required. I don't see excessive rise and fall of the breechblock and had no knowledge of any problems when doing the build. I have indicated the rise and fall of the kit block and it is about 0.017". I have three low walls, two thinside and one Winder. The thinsides measure 0.017" and 0.010", the Winder 0.020". 

As far as called out radiuses, I did not pay too close attention to non-critical dimensions on the prints, just filed and finished to suit. The kit turned out OK, and I am satisfied with it. It was my first go at a firearm from a kit after making several steam and IC engines from kits and scratch. It is not something I would recommend for a beginner, but it is certainly doable.

I did something similar when building my rifles to work out the correct geometry for the internals but I didn't get quite as elaborate as he did, this was especially useful for the scaled down mini-highwall. Also the modifications I did that eliminated the external screw heads and the sear pin ends from appearing on the exterior of the receiver would have been extremely difficult without doing this.

I mentioned earlier that I would try to get some pics posted of these mods in case someone else might be interested and I am nearing that point on the one I am working on now so maybe in a few days I can do this. The lower tang is simple, I just machined it with small flanges on each side at the back ends of the (shortened) side rails then machined matching pockets into the rear of the receiver and drilled/tapped retaining screw holes. This setup holds the tang/trigger rock solid but the real reason was to eliminate, what was to me anyway, those unsightly screw heads from the sides of the receiver. The sear pin was MUCH more tricky, I machined slots into the upper portion of the receiver parallel to the slots in the lower part for the lower tang them made a small "carrier" with matching side rails for the sear. The sear and spring are held in this carrier and the whole assembly is then slide into place along with the lower tang, this involves a complete redesign of the sear and a minor relocation of the hammer notches. All-in-all it's admittedly a lot of time and trouble for no real gain except for appearance, however this is only a hobby and it's what I wanted so to me it's worth the extra trouble for that cleaner receiver exterior.      

My work-around for that problem was to lay an actual lever on my scanner, import the scanned image into CAD, then scale the image until the center to center distance between the lever pivot hole and link pin hole of the image matched the c-c distance of the actual lever.
Then I simply drew the two circles for both pinholes, and copy-traced the outline of the rest of the lever.
It worked.